1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method of establishing a time interval between consecutive maintenance actions for a printing device, the method comprising the steps of determining a job time needed to print an incoming print job.
2. Description of Background Art
For a printing device, especially an inkjet based printing device, a marking material quality and placement, degrades during printing. The marking material may be ink drops, toner particles, etc. After some time, a maintenance action may be initialized to clean and wipe the print unit. The print unit may be a print head, a photovoltaic image forming unit, a direct imaging processing drum, etc. After this procedure, the quality of the print unit is refreshed and the quality of the prints will be correct. However, the maintenance action has to be repeated in time.
In case of an inkjet printer, a method is known from U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2007/0291074, wherein an ink jet printing device determines a timing of executing a discharge recovery processing based on the discharge amount of ink for each predetermined region discharged from a recording head in a multi-pass mode. This is disadvantageous, since when a print job is to be printed on the printing device, a maintenance action may be invoked during the print job at a moment that leads to a decrease of the average print quality of the print job.